(Adapting) The Osterman Weekend

Hi Aki,

This weekend we watched The Osterman Weekend a 1984 adaptation of the thriller by Robert Ludlum, directed by Sam Peckinpah in what turned out to be the last picture he made.

The story is preposterous so I’ll just give it brief: CIA agent Fassett (John Hurt) finds his wife murdered. She was killed by the KGB but what Fassett doesn’t know is that CIA head Maxwell Danforth (Burt Lancaster) greenlit the killing in a swap with the KGB, and Danforth’s men even videotaped the woman’s murder along with the lovemaking session between her and her husband moments before she was killed.

Now Fassett has come to Danforth with a proposal: he claims that in the course of tracking his wife’s killers he has uncovered ‘The Omega Organization’ a secret KGB cell of prominent wealthy Americans, all linked by their friendship from college. Every year these three men meet with a fourth, the crusading, ultra-patriotic TV interviewer, John Tanner (Rutger Hauer). Tanner has been attacking Danforth for some time, but Danforth thinks that if Fassett can use Tanner to uncover Omega it will further Danforth’s political ambitions.

Tanner is shocked at the idea his old friends might be traitors but goes along with it and Fassett fills his house (which is set in the wild hills of Oxnard far from anyone else) with cameras and microphones so Fassett and Tanner himself can spy on the three friends during their weekend visit. Fassett plays tapes designed to make the three nervous; they don’t know anything about Fassett, and think Tanner is the one behind it.

Tensions mount and the four are soon at one another’s throats. But when two of them try to escape Fassett has them murdered. This leaves Tanner with Bernie Osterman (Craig T. Nelson) as the only two left, at which point Fassett lets Tanner know it was all a setup – the three men were only involved with a tax dodge, not the Soviets.

Fassett orders his men to attack Tanner and Osterman, but between Tanner and his wife the spies are overcome. But Fassett kidnaps Mrs Tanner and the Tanner boy. He uses this to force Tanner to expose the truth about Danforth on his TV show – because Fassett has unearthed the tape the CIA made of his wife’s murder, and he knows that Danforth had agreed to it. Fassett’s whole plan has been to maneuver Danforth and Tanner to this point, so he can show the world what Danforth really is and be avenged for his wife’s murder.

Tanner seems to go along, but with Osterman’s help he records his part of the show in advance; Danforth and Fassett are both live, but Tanner is involved with somebody (who is never made clear) to track the video feed from Fassett’s secret location so he can confront Fassett. Fassett, his revenge complete, aims his pistol at Tanner, forcing Tanner to shoot and kill him. Tanner finds his wife, son, and dog bound and helpless but unharmed. Meanwhile the final summing-up Tanner pre-recorded plays on: a statement to the television audience that they are really to blame for all this, that television has made the country passive and unconnected with the realities of life, and challenging them to turn their televisions off – expecting that we won’t be able to do so.

That’s the end of the story. I don’t know what the plot of Ludlum’s novel was, but it has been apparently much changed here. One of the Peckinpah experts on the commentary track in fact suggested the possibility that this tale might have been a more mainstream story of the weekend gone wrong, which after achieving fame Ludlum retrieved from his trunk and overlaid with the frame of the espionage thriller in order to make a quick sale. In turn the producers were eager to get the Ludlum brand name on a production, so they got the rights to this one without having the slightest respect for the material.

So what I want to look at is how do you adapt a novel you don’t like?

In this case, your strongest asset is the Ludlum brand: political espionage thrillers in which nothing is as it seems, and the American government is no different from the Soviets. And so in order to maximize box-office, the producers give us that.

But the meat of the story, and the most interesting scenes, are set in the Tanner house during the weekend, as the old friends find old antagonisms resurfacing, lose trust in one another, and finally confront one another as enemies. So this is what you’d like to see made into the entire Act 2 if you can.

The solution arrived at (this movie) was one we can lay 90% at the doorstep of the producers screenwriters and studio. Ten percent or less would then go to Peckinpah who had not made a film in a number of years, had not had a hit in much longer, had made many enemies in Hollywood and was suffering from ill health. Peckinpah is said to have regarded Osterman not as a major work but only as a move back into the business. He wanted to prove he could shoot this in budget, on schedule, deliver solid entertainment even though the story was crap and preposterous – and then work this into his next deal, which might be closer to a picture he really wanted to make. For their part, the producers got a chance to get a ‘name’ director with a flair for action and cutting at a bargain price, a chastened wild man they hoped they might control. So Peckinpah mainly shot the script, he stayed in budget, didn’t get all the coverage he otherwise would have liked, and worked with the actors to get good performances all around. And then he managed to slip in a bit of his own views and style along the way, as much as he thought he could get away with.

So our first problem is the whole setup. The plot, as ridiculous as it is, bears also the sin of complexity. This is a major flaw since it means half an hour or 40 minutes are wasted just in talky scenes trying to sell us on a situation that is patently ludicrous: that an investment banker, a plastic surgeon, and a TV writer/producer, all successful, all rich, agree to work for the KGB to overthrow the government of the United States (in some way that is never specified). Then a successful network TV newsman who knows just how to manipulate video footage to make it say anything that you want, believes in some footage that he himself calls the ‘easiest sort of thing to fake’ and believes it so much that he now throws away 20 years of friendship and agrees to hand his friends over to the authorities.

Well, you aren’t going to convince anybody of any of this. So either come up with another solution, or cut this to the bone so you win some more time to examine the process of the friends’ falling-out.

What other solution could there be? Here we find a fatal flaw: what Tanner is told is a lie. Therefore we can’t offer him any true evidence. But maybe we could say that the four friends were involved with espionage in college. For that matter, why do they have to be friends from college? They could have been in the army together, or working abroad for some mutual company. This company might have been involved with what the friends thought was industrial espionage, only it turns out (or so Fassett can claim) to have been in truth political Cold War espionage.

This kind of solution is somewhat less preposterous. It lays the foundation for an honest suspicion on Tanner’s part as well as allowing any sort of secrets buried in the friends’ past operations they might not want to see brought to light. Giving the friends a past with some sort of violence in it would also make more believable whatever violence the men resort to when they fall out on the fatal weekend.

Now let’s talk about who’s to blame. The evil is the deception and crimes the government feels compelled to engage in during the Cold War. Danforth believes so easily in the fictitious Omega conspiracy simply because he sees Reds under every bed, he want to distrust everybody he can’t directly control, and he wants to launch some sort of criminal expose to advance his political career to the next step, presumably the White House. (Peckinpah was quoted as saying he modeled Danforth on Alexander Haig ‘as exactly as I though I could get away with.’)

The evil isn’t television per se, which is only a tool or technology the spies use in their work. This makes the final lines, spoken by a man whose career has been based in TV, and who has just used the medium to expose a dangerous man and now tries to blame television for all the evil in the world, seem not only laughable but not supported by anything else in the picture. It may be true, it may be laudable, but it is tacked-on to this picture, and it’s out of place in a suspense thriller. Peckinpah is not Pakula and this movie is not The Parallax View.

The movie makes a game effort to detail and sell the conspiracy, but I think it’d be better to go the exact opposite way: since you’re never going to get us to buy this whole thing, don’t give us any exposition of it. Leave it surreal, abstract. Suggest without saying. Indulge in the sin of obscurity whenever clarity leads to preposterousness.

So here’s my suggestion: open with the death of Fassett’s wife. But show us Fassett screening it over and over in some dark room. Then the titles over the Tanners on a hunting trip (they are good bow-hunters, which figures in the resolution of the siege of the house later on). The Tanners come home to find their house taken over by Fassett and his men. He has already installed all his surveillance gear and gives a bare-bones explanation of this Omega business, then introduces Danforth via video. Danforth agrees to be on Tanner’s show providing Tanner goes along with Fassett this weekend. Tanner is still making up his mind when his friends drive up.

One of the principles in getting us in the audience past what can’t be explained, or what we’ll never believe, is to move quickly through the scenes, while distracting us with eye-candy: violence or sex or gags or stars. In the end maybe we’ll walk out of the theater shaking our heads in disbelief, but we won’t mind so long as we feel we’ve had enough enjoyable sights and stunts along the way.

Maybe the biggest sin of this movie is that with the great cast it had (Chris Sarandon and Dennis Hopper round out the four friends; their wives include Meg Foster, Cassie Yates, and Helen Shaver) it doesn’t make the most of them. The growing suspicions, doubts, distrust among the friends could have played out (in another world) like The Big Chill meets Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Rather than short-change the exposition, the movie instead short-changes the dramatic rupturing of the friendships. And this was done in the name of making sense out of the nonsense of the setup which turns out to be not only nonsense, but false.

(20 April 2009)